2004-11-26
Time
I'll go to sleep and hear Thoreau's quote going through my head.
We think of time, and how it just floats by...how each season is completely different from the next. Our hearts do not beat to the same rhythm each time--these things change like leaves in the fall...
I'd walk through the dark streets, and surrounded by clocks and lamplights. I've looked at pictures of past instances--trivial moments frozen in an image...and it's almost like a capsule. Looking at pictures almost, sometimes, takes us back into that same instance of long ago. I'll recall what the air tasted like, or how I felt.
Glancing through old pictures, remembering something back in time, is like going back and living in that world of the past. Stories begin...and they finish just as quickly as they begin.
Just as quickly. One October dusk I sat on the park bench with what felt like tired-eyes...and I simply kept thinking of Roger. The leaves danced tragically to the ground and I spent the better-half of my favorite seasons in mourning over something that was fated to fail.
The stories and sequences of events that make up time and history must be the water that flows over the smooth rocks. Because when Henry compared time to a stream and said that "it's thin current slides away..." he most likely meant...events.
Events are the thin currents that pass and never return. They simply run and curve through bends and over rocks. Where the Red Fern grows and where the willow weeps. Where dried leaves fall and the tired owl sleeps.
So it's thin current slides aways...but eternity remains...
That line always pins my heart, kissing it at the same time: eternity remains underneath the cold waters and currents. It must all be a large cycle, this life of ours...all one motion.
Like the setting sun or ocean waves at dawn. I'd like to sit on a chilly, gray morning, huddled in my coat and look out at the ocean's horizon. I'd whisper the entire quote to myself as the ghosts of my memories float aimlessly about my head. The visions are sometimes so strong that one cannot help but see them come alive...
How they dance and leap. I once asked myself what separates our memories from fiction? If it's not in front of me...then there's no proof it ever actually happened.
I'd drink deeper from this life...
I remember the other night--half-asleep--and going through my living room. I saw that my nephew was here: his intense black eyes and dark hair--in many ways...he looks like me at a young age. So I pulled the kid aside and said, there are people in this world who are full of it...overly-sensitive bastards..., I said, before falling asleep.